Writers in the Storm

If you’ve been a reader of WITS for some time, you’ve seen us joke about process envy on a number of occasions. What is it about writers that makes us so convinced someone else has the secret ingredient to the guaranteed-best-seller process?

Laura and I were brainstorming a couple of weeks ago and I mentioned how excited I was to be in the revision stage of the manuscript. I believe she said something along the lines of—and I’m paraphrasing here to protect innocent ears—“you’re crazy.” Anywhoo, that discussion turned into a process comparison between the 4 WITS bloggers and, voila, the "Process Throwdown" was born.

I’ll start.  :-)

A Pantser with Suspenders
I start with an idea. It could be a title, a first line, an object—something, anything that starts the creative pin-balling of ideas. For a few weeks the idea will bounce around in my head, I’ll mull and noodle and mull some more.

Then I start jotting down notes. Each project has a notebook of its own. I’ll write down character names and flush out character sketches; location ideas from city or state to what a room may look like; research notes; prop ideas (a teal 1957 Chevy pick-up for the current WIP, for example); phrases that inspired me from whatever novel I’m reading at the time; and, of course, plot ideas.

Somewhere in here I create a new word document for the manuscript. A shiny, white document (well, shiny and white in theory—my laptop screen is pretty spotty and smudged) that will become the first draft.

And I write.

I’d love to say I don’t look back once I’ve started, but truthfully, I’ll redo my first chapter two or three (okay, okay, four) times. But past that, I plow through the first draft. Plotting goes only as far as the next two chapters and usually happens on the treadmill or stationary bike (I had to dictate a note to myself once after a particularly exciting a-ha moment and then could barely make out what I was talking about from all the huffing and puffing, but that’s a story for another time).

Critiques on that first draft are filed until I’m done writing. That doesn’t mean I don’t glance through them to see if there are any major red flags, but I don’t stop to incorporate the changes. If I come across a plot problem or character defect, I’ll adjust moving forward and jot a note to fix accordingly in the earlier portions. But no looking back.

Now that I’ve pantsed my way through a first draft, I snap on the suspenders and … are you ready? … plot. [Note: There’s another post on plotting for pantsers here.]

Once the first draft is done, I do a beta read and take notes—no editing, just notes. Then I read a second time and write out the main points of each scene on color-coded index cards. Why color-coded? Glad you asked. One color for each of the different plot points. Those cards then go up on my wall where I can see the flow of the book and what’s missing. This is when I review all the critiques and feedback I’ve received and make additional notes on what areas need strengthening.

This is actually my favorite part. It’s a puzzle and I love puzzles!

And yes, I know … if I love this part, why don’t I plot before I start and skip the whole messy, why-the-hell-did-I-ever-go-down-this-hole first draft? Because that first messy draft is like standing and staring into the fridge or pantry and pulling out odd bits with only a vague idea what you’ll make with them. Then comes the magic—putting the ingredients together (plot points), adding the seasoning (layering details), and stir (revise, revise, revise) until perfect.

I’ve come to enjoy my process. Sure, there are times I wish I had a GPS to navigate through that first dark draft. But I love the adventure of wandering off on different trails and seeing where they lead.

Are you happy with your process or do you suffer from process envy?

About Orly

After years of pushing the creativity boundary in corporate communications, Orly decided it was time for a new challenge. Three women’s fiction manuscripts later (plus a handful of picture books), it’s safe to say she’s found her creative outlet. When she’s not talking to her imaginary friends, she’s reading or at least trying to ignore everyone around her long enough to finish “just one more paragraph.” Orly is the founding president of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.

You can find her on Twitter at @OrlyKonigLopez or on her website, www.orlykoniglopez.com.

Today I'm sharing a really fun present to help you to ring in the new year. When I told Laura Drake about the new Microsoft Sway, she about lost her mind. It is extremely creative and cool, but super easy to use. Best of all, it integrates seamlessly with OneDrive and Office Online and it's FREE. Laura begged me to share it with everyone at WITS because y'all need it. 

Many people are comparing Sway to PowerPoint, but I think it's more like a digital scrapbook. Imagine being able to brainstorm and scrapbook your story in a format that could be shared via social media or embedded in a blog. Or gathering video and photos in one spot to spark your own creativity. Or being able to quickly fashion a video to share with a book group or your agent.

Welcome to the new world of Sway.

Laura's Sample Book Trailer - Sweet On You

We made this trailer in under 20 minutes. Half that time was taken up with Laura saying, "Oooh! Oooh! Try that one...no THAT one!"

I really like how it turned out for such a quick slap-together and I can't wait to do more, especially once the program goes beyond the Preview stage. We didn't add videos or links, just some photos and some text. There is so much more that can be done with this program.

[How fabulous is that? Feel free to click either of those social links to share it!]

Now that I have your attention, let's talk about Sway.

• The program is viable on any platform or device - Windows, Mac, tablets, etc.
• Go to http://sway.com if you want to get signed up.
• Sway Preview is now open to anybody (as of 12/15).
• Sway is perfect for storytelling - whether it's your book, a camping trip, or an ad campaign.
• Like paper scrapbooking, Sway is all about your imagination.

Current Limitations

• You must have a Microsoft account.
• There are limits to the current options like layouts, colors and styles. More are coming, but Microsoft is really taking their time collecting feedback before they go live with the "full" version. Here's the "official" Sway Suggestion Box.
• You need to get used to creating in the "Storyline" and then using the "Preview Pane" on the right to see the results. (But WOW, the results.)

The first thing I thought of when my friends at Microsoft showed me a demo was, "Book Trailers!" Sway is ideal for a visual pitch of your book, and I hope authors take advantage of it.

My favorite Sway features

• You can add content from just about anywhere on the web or from your own device (see pic to the right).
• You can also share content in tons of places, either via social media or by sending a link. The person doesn't even need to have Sway to view what you send.
• Since creating/editing Sways works in any browser, on any device with a screen width >600 pixels, it can work on tablets, Macs and PCs.
• It integrates with Office Online, which is also free.
• You can search the web for content from inside the app.
• Since it integrates with OneDrive, all my photos are easy to access.
• It's much more user friendly than PowerPoint. Example: it took me 10 minutes to give Laura the gist of Sway and turn her loose. It takes me at least an hour to get people up to speed on PowerPoint.
• Sway is very kid-friendly, and I expect to see tons of Sways at future school and scouting events.
• Microsoft actually really wants our feedback so the users have a golden opportunity to influence the direction and features of the software via UserVoice.

Here's a post with "5 Things To Know About Sway."

Demo of "How to Use Sway"

[youtube=http://youtu.be/wPNwJb3z80Q]

Okay, it's your turn! Had you heard of Sway? What are your questions? What ideas do you have for how this program could be used?

As a fun New Year's gift, I will pick a commenter and create a Sway based on their links, photos and text. Simply let me know in the comments that you want to be added to the drawing. We'll announce the winners next week and post their final Sways on the social media channel of their choosing.

Happy New Year, everybody!

~ Jenny
@JennyHansenCA

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About Jenny Hansen

By day, Jenny provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. By night she writes news articles, humor, memoir, women’s fiction and short stories. After 18+ years as a corporate software trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at JennyHansenCA or at Writers In The Storm.

Sherry Thomas

I like directions. I am, moreover, very good at following directions. Lately, however, I find myself balking at one particular set of directions: writing rules. Now I’m the last person to suggest that everything about writing is subjective and therefore any rule should be kicked in the gonads before it even walks through the door. But I have become quite impatient with how some of those general guidelines are presented: as implacable absolutes.

Offending rule #1: Don’t start a book with a prologue

I used to shrug at that, even when I was a rank beginner. Surely, I thought, since there are so many good and successful books that start with prologues, that fallacy would die a natural death before long. Sadly, I was wrong. I last came across someone asking serious questions about whether a prologue was verboten only a month ago.

A quick trip to my own bookshelves returns with some very prominent titles that start very prominently with prologues. Lord of the Rings, for example. The Da Vinci Code, yes. Switching genres slightly, The Secret History by Donna Tartt also features a prologue. Strictly speaking, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone does not have a prologue. But if your chapter 2 starts with “Nearly ten years had passed since the Dursleys had woken up to find their nephew on the front step,” I’d say your chapter 1 is a prologue in everything but name.

Closer to home, Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase opens unabashedly with a prologue—and that book has sat at the top of the All About Romances Top 100 Romances poll for at least a decade. And Born in Ice, the first Nora Roberts book I ever picked up? You guessed it, prologue!

Don’t write boring prologues, if you must have rules about prologues. But let’s stop badmouthing prologues in general. If a book opens well, who cares whether it is a chapter 1 or a prologue?

Offending rule #2: Stay away from adverbs

Don’t mix your prints. Don’t wear black with navy. Don’t wear white after Labor Day. These used to be fashion maxims, taken as self-evident and immutable. Well, they have all fallen by the wayside in recent years. And winter white is considered terribly chic these days.

Not that I think adverbs should ever be in fashion en masse. It doesn’t hurt for writers to go for nouns and verbs, which are stronger, more impactful words. But we should be cognizant that sometimes an adverb can be the most efficient and elegant of way of saying what you want to say.

I need to apologize to the blogger who brought this to my attention: I can’t remember or find out who you are. But the article is from People.com, concerning an on-air faux pas on the part of Kathy Lee Gifford, who didn’t do her homework before she interviewed the actor Martin Short. Mr. Short had lost his beloved wife fairly recently. Ms. Gifford, ignorant of that, pressed him for answers about his relationship.

"How many years are you in love with her now?" inquired Gifford.

Short, already looking stricken, quietly replied, "Thirty-six."

Quietly. That word made the sentence. Sometimes adverbs simply do it better.

 Offending Rule #3: Show, don’t tell

Now I am veering into sacred-cow territory. No matter, one person’s sacred cow is another’s future steak. Not that I have anything against showing—most of my time is spent trying to guide readers deeper into the hearts and minds of my characters via showing. But telling has its place in, well, storytelling.

The movie equivalent to telling would be narration, also known as the voice-over, often disparaged as a cheap trick by directors who can’t do what needs to be done visually. But as this Movieline.com article by Nathan Pensky points out,

Even the most anti-narration snob would have to concede that the larger film canon contains some pretty notable exceptions to this rule. The Naked City, A Clockwork Orange, Sunset Boulevard, GoodFellas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Big Lebowski, The Shawshank Redemption — all use narration, and far from stalling story or characterization, with them it pushes everything forward.

Why do people persist in telling, instead of showing? A lot of times telling is the most efficient way of getting information across, especially at the beginning of a work. The most important job a writer has is to suck in her readers. No reader cares whether you are telling or showing, as long as you are effectively sweeping her along.

I never tire of using the example of Kristan Higgins’s opening—in the prologue, no less—of her book Too Good to be True.

 Making up a boyfriend is nothing new for me. I’ll come right out and admit that. Some people go window shopping for things they could never afford. Some look at online photos of resorts they’ll never visit. Some people imagine that they meet a really nice guy when, in fact, they don’t.

If that’s not telling, I don’t know what is. And that is a tremendous beginning. Certainly pulled me right in.

I often open my own books in the third person omniscient point of view, because I want to situate readers in the story as quickly as possible. For my YA fantasy The Burning Sky, after a dozen different beginnings and much hair pulling, I decided I needed to tell, rather than show. And this is what I did:

 Just before the start of Summer Half, in April 1883, a very minor event took place at Eton College, that venerable and illustrious English public school for boys. A sixteen-year-old pupil named Archer Fairfax returned from a three-month absence, caused by a fractured femur, to resume his education.

Almost every word in the preceding sentence is false. Archer Fairfax had not suffered a broken limb. He had never before set foot in Eton. His name was not Archer Fairfax. And he was not, in fact, even a he.

This is the story of a girl who fooled a thousand boys, a boy who fooled an entire country, a partnership that would change the fate of realms, and a power to challenge the greatest tyrant the world had ever known.

Expect magic.

 

Telling? No doubt. A better opening than any of the dozen that preceded it? No doubt.

At their core, all the rules I rail against today are well meaning and good to keep in mind. As best-practice guidelines and not absolutes. In writing, as in anything else, different circumstances require different approaches. And it’s generally better to have more tools at our fingertips than fewer. So go into those trenches with a full arsenal, if you can.

(And of course, everything in this article is a suggestion, not a rule.)

Do you have a writing rule you're afraid to break? Or maybe you'd rather share your own successful rule breaking?

USA Today-bestselling author Sherry Thomas loves nothing more than the mix of explosive action and combustible romance. In her career so far, she has written more romance than action, but she is making up for it with a YA fantasy trilogy and a wuxia-inspired duology. Her books regularly receive starred reviews and best-of-the-year honors from trade publications, including such outlets as the New York Times and National Public Radio. She is also a two-time winner of Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award.

And by the way, English is her second language.

You can find out more about Sherry’s books at SherryThomas.com